


The World and the Nature of Everything

by RecklessDaydreamer



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Amnesia, Canon Compliant, Carlos's backstory, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-28 21:53:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7658035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecklessDaydreamer/pseuds/RecklessDaydreamer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos isn't sure how he got to Night Vale. His memories begin as he stands on the outskirts of town, hair brushed out of his face by a breeze that smells like sand and sunlight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World and the Nature of Everything

**Author's Note:**

> This is mostly based on episodes 13 (A Story About You), 25 (One Year Later), and 55 (The University of What It Is). Spoilers through episode 70B (Review).

 

Carlos left the University of What It Is on a sabbatical. Just to clear his head, as Dr. Kayali put it. She’d told him, “You need a break.” And maybe he did. She suggested he take some time off. “Maybe study something, write a paper at leisure,” she added. If he felt like it. He came to Night Vale on a whim and set up shop, hired some scientists from the community college to help out part-time. He knows the university is probably looking for him, is probably wondering where he went and why he hasn’t returned. But he’s happier here, breathes easier than he ever did in the city, and he has Cecil. Cecil counts for a thousand reasons to stay in Night Vale.

(Why didn't she look for him again?)

 

Carlos hitchhiked from the University of What It Is because nobody would give him a research grant to study “whatever I find that looks interesting, it sounds so weird, there must be _something_ ”. Dr. Kayali suggested he study something less vague, like the mineral deposits north of the university, but he had no interest in mineral deposits. He brought only what he could wear or carry in his single bag, just the bare essentials. He walked the last twelve miles because the trucker who gave him a ride wouldn’t go any closer. By the time he got to Night Vale, he was too tired to even question the voice on the radio that directed him to a lab near the pizza place. He never looked back.

(Why didn't anyone come after him?)

 

Carlos begged for the chance to take a research trip away from the University of What It Is. He’d been teaching class after class, semester after semester, for years. Maybe a decade. He wanted a chance to stretch his legs, study something new. His department finally agreed to let him go, Dr. Kayali shouting after him as he practically skipped out of her office, “Two semesters! That’s all!” When he glanced in his rearview mirror as he drove the van through the university’s gates, Dr. Kayali was standing there, arms crossed, gaze burning the back of his head. But he had a year to study strange happenings far, far away from the university. That was all he’d wanted. He started taking measurements and readings almost as soon as he found the box with his equipment in the back of the van. What he found—earthquakes no one could feel, radioactive radio stations—convinced him to stay longer, then longer still, until he almost forgot about the university altogether.

(Why didn't anyone remind him?)

 

Carlos fell asleep at his desk at the University of What It Is one summer evening while finishing a semester report for Dr. Kayali. He woke up slumped over a strange work station, head on an open notebook full of half-finished charts and graphs, hand loosely clutching an Erlenmeyer flask. He was wearing a lab coat and surrounded by chemistry equipment. He was a geologist who had never so much as distilled a sample in his life. But he adapted, as people do: changed his profession to scientist, studied science, and pretended he had always meant to be there. In fact, he was constantly searching for a way back to the life he had disappeared from, but there was so much to study in Night Vale—even if you just focused on the geology, the bloodstones and the earthquakes and the BROWN STONE SPIRE and the new edible rock called vimbee—and eventually he stopped looking.

(Someone must have looked for _him_.)

 

Carlos is a scientist from the University of What It Is. He works with a Dr. Kayali. He has dark hair, graying at the temples, and teeth like a military cemetery. He wears a lab coat and rents a lab next to Big Rico’s. This has been true since Cecil first said it into his microphone one June, and only since then. Perhaps without even realizing it, Cecil invented a handsome scientist and wove him into Night Vale with the power of the Voice and community radio, and it was as if Carlos had always been there. Perhaps a Carlos was needed in Night Vale. Or perhaps not. But he is still there, part of the city, pinned there by the Voice. A city-wide hallucination.

(But Carlos knows things he’s never told Cecil, that Cecil never could have guessed…)

(Or, worse yet, Night Vale could be his own hallucination…)

 

Carlos isn’t sure how he got to Night Vale.

He barely knows who he is, let alone where (Google Maps shows Night Vale surrounded by a field of black) or when (none of the clocks work and the sunset is always at the wrong time). His memories begin as he stands on the outskirts of town, hair brushed out of his face by a breeze that smells like sand and sunlight. He’s thought of a dozen ways he might have arrived in Night Vale, but none have jogged his memory. Carlos can’t remember _anything_. His memories begin and end in Night Vale. Objectively he knows he must have lived before—he’s in his thirties, probably, so the gray is premature, probably, and he has experience with science, probably— but he has no evidence to support that. Without memory, without a past, he feels unmoored.

 

 

Cecil does a story, a few months after Carlos arrives, about someone else who came to Night Vale. “This is a story about _you_ ,” Cecil says over the airwaves, and Carlos feels like Cecil was speaking directly to him. Carlos will always remember it; it’s as clear in his mind as his past isn’t. He’s alone in the lab—the other scientists have already gone home—doing a dry distillation of ground bloodstones, scribbling down temperatures and observations. The bloodstone powder is emitting a strange, shimmering gas that changes colors as the temperature rises. Carlos is so fascinated that the Voice’s smooth diction fades into the background entirely.

But as Cecil goes on, describing a life abandoned, his motions slow, then stop altogether. His hand slackens around his (contraband) pen. He wrenches the gas pipe closed, letting the Bunsen burner huff out. Safety first. Curled up in his desk chair, he stares out the window into the deep blue twilight, unable to convince himself that the person Cecil is describing isn’t him.

(Did he ever have a fiancée?)

(Did he ever have a different job?)

(Those men in suits at the back of the room during that community meeting… were they looking for him for some reason other than science?)

And then Cecil signs off, and the spell is broken, and Carlos gets up and leaves the lab.  His notebooks stay splayed across the desk, his pen still where it was laid down midsentence, his laptop screen glowing blue. There are no consequences for getting up and walking away from your desk.

Streetlamps are coming on, haltingly, one or two at a time. He flicks open his car door and sinks into the seat.

(Ford Probe… that’s a coupe, right? Sleek. Sporty. Comes in red… It’s a lot like this car, now that he thinks about it. He isn’t sure what brand this car is. He bought it from the Night Vale used car lot after he arrived.)

Carlos isn’t thinking quite straight. That’s his excuse for why he turns left instead of right on his way home and drives out into the Sand Wastes. He drives for a long time without encountering anyone, just listening to the sound of the wheels singing on the asphalt and the soft staticky murmur of the radio. The sky is vast and dark and endless.

Carlos stops the car and gets out. He sits on the trunk and looks back at Night Vale, visible only by the glow it creates in the darkened sky—bright purple for the most part, but shimmery in the spot where the Glow Cloud (all hail) and its child usually float at night. It’s beautiful.

He could leave it right now… get in his car and drive away. No consequences. The thought comes as if he hasn’t tried that already, as if he never spent a desperate day and night with his hands clenched, white-knuckled, on the steering wheel, trying with everything he has to _just get out_.

Night Vale doesn’t like people to leave.

Carlos can’t help but wonder if there’s a crate in his trunk, if a long black limousine will come purring out of the darkness at any moment. He gets off the trunk and pops it open. It’s stuffed haphazardly full of notebooks and beakers and electrical devices. No crate. (Ticking or otherwise.)

He sits, feeling a little silly.

(If he turned and looked behind him, would he see that dark planet?)

The Glow Cloud (all hail) and its child fade from their usual million vibrant daytime colors to a peaceful, nebulous violet. Their colors drift through shades of purple, though the young Cloud occasionally breaks out a rebellious magenta.

(Purple clouds, that’s what Cecil said. Purple clouds above the city…)

( _No!_ )

Carlos jumps off the trunk and throws himself into the car. He slams on the gas with more force than is necessary, scientifically speaking. The radio hums to life along with the happy growl of the engine, and Carlos spins the car to point away from Night Vale. He’s getting out of here. He’s going home. (Wherever that is.) He speeds off into the night, headlights casting a glow on endless stretches of sand and silent cacti sentinels…

(…that light in the distance. What _is_ that? It’s not Desert Bluffs. That’s in the other direction.)

It’s… the realization sweeps over him… it’s Night Vale, purple Glow Clouds (all hail) and all. He’s come right back to where he started.

Carlos comes roaring back into Night Vale with the windows down and the wind whipping his hair in his face, trying not to think about it.

It doesn’t help. Of course not. No force on earth can keep Carlos the Scientist from thinking. It’s practically his job.

Carlos drives aimlessly down quiet streets, lit periodically by streetlamps and the strange lights in the sky. The radio weaves a silence with a warp of gentle static and a weft of soft speech. An intern on the night shift reads off the financial news and a correction to an earlier report in a voice that quivers only slightly. There’s a commercial break, and then two more commercial breaks, and finally a different intern comes on to apologize for the multiple commercials and explain that the last intern was vaporized by the broadcasting equipment.

An on-air eulogy, no matter how brief, is more than most Night Valians get. Maybe that’s why Cecil never runs out of interns. They want a chance to be recognized at their death, though they never last long, and then they’re forgotten.

Of course Carlos hasn’t forgotten a job, a fiancée, an entire life. Of course a dark planet didn’t wipe his memory of his previous time in Night Vale. Of course not.

But that’s the thing about wild theories. They just keep spinning themselves, no matter how hard you try to ignore them. _What if?_ you think. _What if? What if?_

Carlos can’t stop thinking about it.

 

 

(Months after his arrival—wait, no, it’s been a year exactly, hasn’t it?)

Carlos hears a voice.

In the fuzzy half-darkness of regaining consciousness, Carlos hears Cecil’s voice.

He wakes up, hauled back from death’s doorstep, with his entire body a blaze of pain and his clothes soaked in blood, and the first thing Carlos hears is Cecil’s voice telling him that everything is going to be all right.

The past hour rushes back to him. The underground city—the tiny people—the ballistics—oh. Yeah. That explains the blood.

He lifts a hand to poke at the tattered, blood-soaked remains of his shirt. Teddy Williams slaps it down. “Hold _still_ ,” he insists. “You were medically dead five minutes ago.”

“Right,” said Carlos. “No moving.” He tries to nod and feels pain shoot through his neck.

Teddy Williams sighs. “What did I tell you?”

Carlos lets his head fall back and relaxes into the sound of Cecil’s voice: smooth and steady, and so incredibly happy. While he’s stuck lying on the floor of the bowling alley, he has time to think.

He just almost _died_. He came closer to the end of his life than he ever has, and he’s had some near-death experiences in his time in Night Vale. And that shakes things into perspective. He would have lost a lot of things that he isn’t prepared to lose… not anymore.

When he’s finally allowed to leave, he walks—more like hobbles—to his car and turns the radio on. Cecil’s still on the air, but his voice doesn’t shake anymore. It’s steady and it swirls gently from the car radio, far from the despairing crack of his voice when he received the report of Carlos’s apparent death. Carlos can practically feel Cecil’s smile, can almost see it. He thumbs the volume higher until Cecil’s smooth voice settles around him like a quilt.

He texts Cecil to meet him in the Arby’s parking lot. Cecil immediately interrupts his monologue to read it on-air and starts the weather so he can leave right away. Of course.

Carlos drives slowly to the Arby’s. When he gets there, he sits on the trunk and waits, watching the strange and lovely lights drift and shimmer overhead. Sure enough, Cecil soon pulls up in the Night Vale version of a VW Beetle, which has six wheels and a shiny green carapace, as well as multifaceted headlights that throw refracted beams over the pavement.

Carlos has been rehearsing this speech in his head. He hopes it makes sense. He hopes Cecil will understand what he means by it. He can’t keep running from Night Vale any longer. It’s not his home, not by a long shot—he’s still an outsider, still feels like he doesn’t quite belong. But he can live with a comfortable in-between. He can learn to love this town. So he can’t push Cecil away any longer. He came far too close to dying this evening, and he didn’t treat death like a new beginning to meet, as he’d always planned. Instead he thought, _I’m never going to see Cecil again_.

They sit together under the mysterious lights, the radio host and the scientist, and they understand each other perfectly.

 

 

As the years pass, as he spends time just living, Carlos is… he sometimes finds it hard to believe, but he’s content. He has science. He has Cecil. He has a life in Night Vale. He even missed that backwards little town when he got trapped away from it for a full year. Though he expected to be able to build a new existence in the desert otherworld, just as he had in Night Vale, he hadn’t counted on Cecil. Cecil, who called him every time he said he would, Cecil, whose cross-dimensional Voice accompanied him every day from the clunky little radio Carlos cobbled together. Cecil, whose visit to the strange desert reminded Carlos of everything he would lose if he chose to stay.

Carlos is so tired of losing things.

At the opera after-party, he holds Cecil tight and declares that Night Vale is his home, really and truly. He wishes he’d realized that earlier.

On the first day he spends back in Night Vale, he asks Cecil for the business card Dr. Kayali gave him on her visit months ago. He remembers the broadcast of the day when she visited Night Vale. He had stopped where he was, staring transfixed into the middle distance, trying desperately to recall a Dr. Sylvia Kayali or the University of What It Is. He knows Cecil kept her business card, perhaps planning to call her later.

Sure enough, Cecil has to delve deep into the black hole that is his desk to retrieve the card. (His desk is a literal black hole created by Station Management as retribution for his request for vacation time a few months back. Cecil installed a plywood shelf where his desk used to be, so he can still use his office, but everything he had been keeping in it has to be fished out in a process involving ritual chanting and blood sacrifice.) Cecil places the card in his hand with a nervous glance, and Carlos looks at the rectangle of white cardstock for a few pensive minutes, traces the Times New Roman print with his thumb.

Carlos dials the number on the back with shaky fingers. He turns on speakerphone and asks Cecil to do the honors.

“Dr. Kayali, University of What It Is. How may I help you?”

The voice is female, low-pitched, practiced and confident. Carlos doesn’t recognize it at all. He leans closer, trying to hear better, trying to wring any flicker of recognition from the recesses of his mind.

“This is Cecil Palmer. We met when you visited Night Vale, if you recall. I believe I’ve located the Carlos you were looking for, Dr. Kayali, though I’m afraid the news is not good. He was recently killed. In a… workplace accident.”

Dr. Kayali takes a long, slow breath. “How—how did it happen?”

Now there’s something familiar in that voice. Not an inflection or turn of phrase. An emotion, one that Carlos knows well from feeling it himself. It’s something like resignation, but deeper, sadder. A resignation to fate. He felt it every time he and Cecil talked when he was residing in—when he was _trapped_ in the desert otherworld.

 “He was working alone near an unstable cliff face. We were in contact, and from the audio we believe he was caught in an avalanche.” Cecil is a good liar. When he puts on his radio voice, not even Carlos can always tell whether he’s lying. And he’s selling it well. Carlos thinks he hears a catch in Cecil’s voice. Maybe he’s remembering another time—years ago, now—when he spoke of Carlos’s death and held back tears.

“He always wanted to go out with a bang,” says Dr. Kayali. Her emotions come through more clearly just then. She’s tired, so very tired. And sad. And smiling, just a little, at the thought. “God, I wish I could have talked to him again… Never mind. It doesn’t matter now. The… the body—did you—”

Carlos, in that instant, wants so badly to speak. To tell her he’s alive. They can talk. Try to piece together what happened…

“Dr. Kayali. I’m here. Um—I’m sorry,” he says, cutting off Cecil’s reply. Cecil gives him a very familiar look, which says _why did you say that_ and _I knew you’d say that_ in the same instant. It’s the look he gives Steve Carlsberg every time they meet, but when he turns it to Carlos it’s tempered with a smile.

Almost as soon as he’s spoken, Carlos _hears_ Dr. Kayali’s shock. It comes across the line like a desert storm sweeping down. “Carlos! Carlos _what in the name of how dare you why you_ —” She stops and takes a breath. “Carlos. Talk to me. And you’d better have answers.”

He doesn’t have answers. But he does talk. He explains (mostly) everything. He apologizes profusely.

She sighs when he’s done. It’s a long sigh, full of total resignation. “Fine. I admit you may have your reasons. Just—Carlos. Good grief. Why didn’t you _call_?”

She sounds like Cecil. It makes Carlos unreasonably guilty. “I was… distracted. Science and all.” He doesn’t explain that he was trying to cut ties. To start a new life. He had thought it would be easier.

“Sounds like you.” She laughs, finally. “All right. You say amnesia?”

“Yes. I don’t study psychology—I study science—but it seems total. It’s like a wall in my head, blocking my whole life except for the time I’ve spent in Night Vale.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

 

Carlos was thirty-one when he left the University of What It Is on a sabbatical to study the strange phenomena of Night Vale. The last time Dr. Kayali saw him or heard from him was as he drove away—no emails, no status reports, nothing. Like the city swallowed him whole. She doesn’t know what his PhD was in; it seems he’d been hired for his general knowledge and charisma and had taught “science”. He didn’t appear to have any family or friends outside his colleagues, and had never been known to date anyone (though apparently not for lack of options—Dr. Kayali describes his past persona as “unconsciously flirtatious, with that hair and all”, and Cecil tells her that the hair has just gotten better).

 

When they start a video chat on Carlos’s laptop, Dr. Kayali almost starts crying. She says he hasn’t changed at all, although it’s been thirty years from the perspective of the University. (Apparently the gray streaks at his temples aren’t new.) Carlos explains that time is weird in Night Vale. They go off on a tangent discussing temporal distortion fields. Cecil gets them back on track, pointing out that it’s hard to get phone calls out of Night Vale, let alone a video feed, and they might not have much longer. He’s listening as avidly as Carlos.

Over an hour later, as they’re about to end the call, Dr. Kayali offers the suggestion that they could reconnect. Carlos could work from Night Vale. There’s certainly enough to study.

Cecil hangs up on Carlos’s old life and wraps his arms around him. They sit like that for a while, Carlos’s head resting on Cecil’s shoulder, Cecil’s hand on Carlos’s knee.

Carlos’s mind is whirling. Now that he has a link to the outside world, he can find out _so much_ from Dr. Kayali. It’s been decades outside Night Vale. Have they cured cancer? Sent a human to Mars? He can ask her… he can ask her… oh, _damn_.

“Cecil?” he says softly.

“Hm?”

“I forgot to ask Dr. Kayali what my last name is.”

Cecil laughs for a long, long time.

 

Few things scare Carlos anymore, except for Valentine’s Day, the street cleaners, the City Council, the tiny city under lane five of the bowling alley, the hooded figures, librarians, the Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In His Home… fine, he’s scared of a lot of things in Night Vale. But he doesn’t even flinch at the Sheriff’s Secret Policemen popping out of such unlikely places as the kitchen sink anymore, so that’s something.

And the lack of memory doesn’t scare him, either. The lack of a past life. He spent nights lying awake, scouring his mind and memory for some fragment of time before Night Vale. But now he’s getting some answers. Now he can find out what he’s missing. And the memories are coming back. They’re fragmented, hazy, disorienting—but they’re coming. He wakes up some mornings with a snippet of past drifting in his brain. He scribbles it down (dream journals are mandatory, after all) or tells Cecil. Together, and with weekly phone calls to Dr. Kayali, they build a picture of who he was, and it doesn’t seem too different from who he is.

A scientist. A logician. A scholar. Intelligent, distractible, a little socially awkward. Fascinated by the world and the nature of everything. Great hair.

And, as his memories return, he finds himself focusing on them less and less. He’s writing a new life, here in Night Vale. He has years and years in front of him to remember when they’ve gone by. And he has all the time in the world to find answers about the past.

He has a boyfriend. A home. So much science to be done. There’s a whole life ahead of him.

Carlos doesn’t need anything more than that.


End file.
